The development of cloud computing and file hosting services has enabled individuals, businesses, and government organizations to easily upload data to and download data from remote storage facilities via the Internet, such as data centers. Magnetic hard disk drives (HDDs) have been employed in data centers as a low-cost means for providing random access to large quantities of data. Because low-latency is an important performance metric in cloud computing, it is desirable for the HDDs employed in data centers to have high data transfer rates.
One approach for achieving high data transfer rate in an HDD is the use of multiple actuators, where each actuator independently controls the position of a different set of one or more read/write heads. Because the position of multiple read/write heads can be controlled simultaneously, data can be read from or written to multiple recording surfaces in the drive, and therefore data can be transferred at a higher rate than in a single actuator HDD. However, due to the added complexity and larger number of moving parts associated with multiple actuator HDDs, such drives are more expensive to manufacture and more prone to failure.